When things got desperate for one Ontario mother, and her child needed more mental health care and support than anyone could provide, the advice she got from nurses and social workers was to abandon him.
That way, he’d be turned over to a children’s aid society, and he’d “get more services.”
“That I have to abandon this kid in the hallway speaks to a very broken system, doesn’t it?” she said in a recent interview.
She and eight other parents who spoke with The Trillium about their experiences described a child welfare system that was not equipped to handle their children’s “complex needs,” a phrase used to describe their children’s mental health and developmental challenges that result in violent or uncontrolled behaviour — putting them, other children in the home, or their parents at risk.
“And now we want to do an audit?” she said.
Premier Doug Ford announced an audit of the child welfare system last month in response to a question from The Trillium about the increasing number of Ontario parents who are surrendering custody of kids with high needs to children’s aid societies — not because they've abused or neglected them, but because they cannot find the services and support they need to keep them safe at home.
The premier’s focus on money didn’t sit well with some of those parents. Since then, The Trillium has spoken with nine parents who’ve been in contact with a Children’s Aid Society (CAS) for help handling their children’s complex needs, and they called for a major overhaul of not only the child welfare system but of the delivery of all provincial supports for children and families.
“So you want to take all of this audit money and do what?” asked the mother who gave up custody of her son through a temporary agreement with a Children’s Aid Society. “Why don't you put it into the health care that's sorely lacking for these kids? Or invest in the social workers who are burnt out?”
Talking of an “audit” when kids need more help “makes caregivers want to riot,” she added.
Neither Ford nor Social Services Minister Michael Parsa gave detailed information about what the audit will entail, how long it will take, or what it could lead to.
“I believe in working with the frontline people that are doing this job, day in and day out, and coming up with ideas on how we can look at making positive changes,” said Ford, when asked about the audit last week.
The parents who spoke with The Trillium about their interactions with the child welfare system through their kids with complex needs shared common complaints.
The majority are adoptive parents who connected with The Trillium through a support group. Many of their children had diagnosed or suspected fetal alcohol syndrome disorder (FASD), with explosive aggression.
Others are biological parents of children with autism who couldn’t get enough support for their child until things reached a crisis point, and CAS was called.
Many said that when they sought provincially funded mental health care or developmental services for their child, they encountered long waitlists and delays, and they did not get those services until they hit a crisis point, by which time it was too late.
They also described maddening layers of red tape, particularly when it comes to applying for provincial funding for children with complex special needs, which many couldn’t get when they needed it because of long waitlists for assessments or rules that made their child ineligible despite a clear need.
Many described crises marked by repeated calls to 911 and trips to hospitals, in between long meetings with bureaucrats and service providers, none of whom had solutions.
When a CAS agency was involved, and the child needed care outside of the home, good placements typically weren’t available — the children were placed in the basement of a CAS office, in hospital psych wards, or they bounced around a series of different foster homes or group homes that also struggled to care for them.
The names in the following stories have been changed to protect the privacy of the children.
Morgan’s story
Morgan was adopted as a toddler by an experienced foster parent.
As they approached puberty, behavioural challenges associated with fetal alcohol syndrome worsened, and they cycled in and out of emergency rooms for months.
“I was stabbed by my child, and then, my child tried to commit suicide, several times,” said Morgan’s mother.
Morgan was admitted to the hospital on a short-term basis, but when they were found with a weapon, the hospital called Morgan’s mother to take them home, and she refused.
“There were threats then: ‘You’re going to abandon your child?’” Morgan’s mother said.
“In the end, they did end up going into care. There was just no other option, safety-wise.”
Morgan was discharged from the hospital to the care of children’s aid, and they were put up in the agency’s basement with four child protection workers. That lasted about four hours until the workers called 911, their mother said.
Morgan went back and forth between the hospital and the CAS basement for about 10 days until one call to the police also brought the fire department to the agency’s basement, and the agency was told they could not house a child there, she said.
“My child ended up in hospital and ended up in a room with guards guarding the door 24 hours a day,” she said. “They could not leave this one room for five months.”
The hospital struggled to manage Morgan and wanted them out. Initially, there was no place for them to go.
Morgan’s mother recalls a meeting with the CAS, the province’s then-child’s advocate Irwin Elman and “about 24 people” from different ministries and service providers around a table.
“Everyone kept saying, ‘No, (Morgan’s) too complex for us,’” she said.
“I thought, all of those times I sat in those meetings for, seriously, week after week after week (with) all the different ministry levels and different agencies — how much money is spent on all these people? But there’s actually no answers to help the children,” she said.
“There’s no answer, no pathway, because these people get to say ‘No.’ The government’s funding facilities, but they get to decide who comes there. So what happens to the kids when they say, ‘no’?”
Eventually, the Children’s Aid Society got a rare court order for Morgan to be transferred to a secure treatment centre about two hours away. It also struggles with Morgan’s behaviour, and uses mechanical and chemical restraints on them.
“Most of the time, they have been alone,” she said. “There is a school, there are places for them to move around outside, but my child just wasn’t safe.”
Morgan has been there for almost two years. Now their mother is struggling to find a step-down treatment for them, so they can leave secure care.
Their mother also does not know what will happen when they become an adult.
She wonders what could have been different if she’d been able to get more support for Morgan earlier on. They’d joined a two-year waitlist for mental health support when their anxiety began building during the pandemic and were still waiting when crisis hit.
“Maybe if we’d received help earlier when it was minor, maybe we wouldn’t be here, or maybe there’d just be more wraparound (support) when we got there,” said Morgan’s mother.
Later, when Morgan was discharged from the hospital, the waitlist for continuing care was nearly three years long.
Adequate care didn’t come with CAS involvement either.
“I did surrender my child to CAS, but during that time, (Morgan) ended up on the roof of (the hospital) to jump — so they’re not any more equipped either,” she said.
She estimates the province has spent millions of dollars on her child, and she’s still had to pay all she can on top of it.
Morgan’s mother wants people to know she loves her child.
“I have never given up on my child. Through everything that we’ve been through, I keep showing up and showing up,” she said. “I need the government to show up with proper programming for what people actually need.”
She credits the hospital and the secure care facility for not giving up on her child either, even when it was difficult, and for keeping them alive.
Ava’s story
Ava is 12 and lives at home with her siblings and mother in rural Ontario.
She has severe autism. In 2020, she began injuring herself and attacking her mother. Her aggression and violence reached a breaking point one day while her mother was on a call with a developmental service provider in their area that provided remote services due to the pandemic.
“I had a meeting with them at one point, and they could hear her in the background destroying everything and they told me that the only thing I could do was to take her to the hospital,” Ava’s mother said.
In the emergency waiting room, Ava was injuring herself, attacking her mother, “and basically out of control,” said her mother.
“They told me what I needed was a break and they were not here to provide me with a break,” she recalled. “I was very upset with that response. Then, the next doctor came in and said they were going to have to call the CAS. And I said, ‘That’s fine and if you don’t, I will. I need help.’”
For Ava, the CAS helped, persuading the hospital to admit Ava to the psych ward.
Ava stayed in the hospital’s psychiatric department for a month. Over that time, the hospital tried out medications and helped get Ava stable enough to return home. The CAS worker assigned to Ava checked on her for another month, her mother said.
“See, most people have terrible things to say about CAS, but for me — I don't know how I would have survived that without the backup,” she said. “It's unfortunate, though, that that's how the backup had to come.”
Ava’s mother said she’s always felt the child welfare system was there because of parents who need help to parent properly or who abuse and neglect their kids — and that wasn’t her situation. As a parent, that label felt “horrible,” she said.
“I wasn’t doing anything wrong,” she said. “My daughter needed help, and nobody would help until the CAS worker got involved.”
One of her recommendations for the province is to separate support for parents of high-needs kids from traditional child protection.
“I wish there was a way to call and ask for help without feeling like you're reporting yourself,” she said.
“It would feel easier to do it, and people wouldn't be afraid. Sometimes you just really do need help.”
In her rural part of Ontario, the service provider for her daughter does help, but has its limits.
“For them to tell me I’m going to have to call CAS if I can’t get help — I was so scared.”
Her home was inspected by the CAS worker, but despite what she expected and feared, she never felt under investigation, though she knows that other parents in the same situation feel that they are.
Another of her recommendations is to fund the necessary therapies when kids with special needs are young, and they can be the most effective.
The Ontario Autism Program, which provides provincial funding for child autism services is “a joke — it’s always been a joke,” she said. While her daughter receives some funding now, it’s hard to spend because Ava’s older and more services in their area are available for younger children.
Funding wasn’t available when Ava was younger and needed it — and she could not afford to pay privately for autism therapy.
Like all of the parents interviewed, she experienced red tape and bureaucratic barriers to getting her daughter support, and she urges the government to provide funding and support to high-needs kids when they need it.
When Ava’s mother looks forward, she’s worried. She’s been told it’s likely to be very difficult to find supportive housing for her as an adult, even though she’ll never be able to live alone.
“She's already bigger than me,” she said. “She's four inches taller than me and she weighs 20 pounds more than me. If she loses control again, I'm not going to be able to handle it. I'm not going to be able to keep myself or her or my other children safe.”
“I’m covered in scars from the last time.”
If it happens again before Ava becomes an adult, she will call CAS again.
Henry’s story
Henry was adopted at two-and-a-half and showed violence early on, which escalated around puberty. While his mother and some professionals have suspected FASD, it’s not easy to prove.
His mother had to fight hard to get funding for complex special needs, which took “meetings after meetings,” spending thousands of dollars on specialists and appealing a denial.
It was a similar struggle to get him into a special needs class at school. She urges the province to extend special needs support to children like hers, whom she was repeatedly told “doesn’t fit the criteria.”
At 13, he went into an emergency foster placement when his temper tantrums became too violent for his family to handle, and then into CAS care on an extended basis.
His mother described a sequence of foster homes: at the first, he was exposed to pornography and started vaping, and so he was moved to another home, which sent him back to her early.
When he threatened her with a knife, he was sent back to the first home he’d been removed from.
At another foster home, he was only there for a few weeks before he destroyed a room and was kicked out.
In a group home, he went AWOL and began stealing cars, and then was caught with a minor child in bed, she said.
She hasn’t had contact with Henry in months.
She describes a “blame game.”
“The child’s not being supported — the child is being continuously put into situations where they’re not going to be able to succeed, and there are expectations being put on them that they can't possibly achieve,” she said. “So the child also feels like a failure, and then they blame themselves for not being able to do what is being asked of them, and then it's their fault that they can't go home.”
She feels the same.
“I really tried everything, I gave everything, I gave up my life for this child to try and get some help and make him successful, give him a fighting chance,” she said. “You don’t see that in the result, which just feels like a failure, and so I feel like a failure. You take that on, and society tends to blame you for that, too.”
Cut the red tape, listen to families
The provincial government is under pressure over the child welfare system from all sides.
Most CAS agencies are running deficits, and some have declared the system is at a “tipping point” or in crisis.
The Ontario Ombudsman recently announced an investigation into a symptom of that crisis: agencies’ placement of children in unlicensed settings, including hotels and CAS offices.
One of the families in this story experienced this when “Morgan” was temporarily placed in a CAS basement.
Another mother said she rejected a temporary care agreement with the CAS when her child was in crisis because the CAS agency suggested a hotel placement could be an option — but, at the same time, mentioned “that they know there are traffickers around there,” she said.
Meanwhile, the Toronto Star has reported extensively on Neveah — a child whose body was found in a Rosedale dumpster and who had been in the care of both the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto and York Region Children’s Aid Society but was returned to her mother before she died.
And Global News has reported on data showing that every three days, a child who has been involved with Ontario’s care system dies.
When Ford announced an “audit” of the system, it was on top of a “redesign” of the system that began four years ago, with no sign of a conclusion.
Overwhelmingly, the parents who spoke with The Trillium are asking the Ford government to overhaul not just Children’s Aid Societies but the entire system of provincial support for children with complex needs and their families so that they get the help they need when they need it, without — in the words of one parent” — the bureaucratic “bulls—.”
According to these parents, the government’s audit should find that provincial social services, health care and education for kids with complex needs are fragmented and inefficient, and when children fall through the cracks and into crisis, it becomes incredibly expensive for Children’s Aid Societies, hospitals and emergency services to step in.
“There is no life-long program for these complex kids from start to finish. It's a handoff here, a handoff there — ‘Oh, it might be autism, so I can't deal with that,’” said one mother.
This means complex kids have “massive” care teams, and the logistics of organizing it all and advocating for their child falls to the legal parents, who are also struggling just to keep going at home, she said.
“That siloed funding, that’s really the crux of the issue,” she said. “You’ve got a kid who’s willing to engage in the therapy and you put them on a waitlist that’s three years long, in that three years the kid could kill themselves. I’m sorry, but that’s what we’re talking about here. It’s the terrible reality our families are facing.”
Another recommendation for the province as it conducts the new audit and redesign is to talk with parents and children, as well as service providers and CAS workers, to understand the problems.
They’re calling for better options for complex needs kids who require intensive, ongoing support, and for the re-establishment of the Ontario Child Advocate’s office closed by the Ford government.
The adoptive parents, in particular, called for better understanding and diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome disorder when a mother does not disclose drinking during pregnancy, and more robust post-adoption support to ensure adoptions are successful.
Many of the parents also called for a reform of provincial services so that parents who are not a threat to their children don’t end up caught in the child protection system just because they need support or respite care.
Sometimes, however, children need both — like Neveah, who had both a developmental disability and was in need of protection from her family when she died.
Elman, the province’s former child advocate, urges the provincial government to create a “child wellbeing system,” modelled after a similar effort in British Columbia, that would ensure children and families get the support they need when they need it and would complement or one day replace the current child protection system.
“The child well-being system starts with two premises: every child should have what they need when they need it in order to thrive, and every family should have what it needs when they need it in order to do right by their child,” he said.
He’s not seeing any openness to that from the Ontario government, however.
“My worry is the word ‘audit’ because this government presently is consumed by money,” he said. “And it's not that money isn't important, but they see money as an end in itself, and money is important for what it can do for people, which is how government must understand money.
“And so we're not talking in an audit about how much money is this new child well-being system going to cost? That's not a question we should be posing now because we haven't thought through what that new system is going to be like.”
Parsa, the minister of Children, Community and Social Services, took questions from The Trillium and Global News this week about his plans for the child welfare system and provincial supports for children with complex needs.
The goal of the audit, he said, is “to make sure that the services that are being provided are of the best to the needs of the children and youth.”
He didn’t have a timeline for it or for the completion of the system redesign, which he said is ongoing.
“We're constantly looking at making sure that the programs that are in place are meeting the needs of those who are receiving the care,” he said.
The Trillium also asked about the red tape that stops families from getting the help their kids need, when they need it.
Parsa also said a new pilot project should “help prevent a lot of the pressures” experienced by these families. The $97-million Extensive Needs Integrated Pathway project launched in 2023 and is run by Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Toronto, the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa and McMaster Children's Hospital in Hamilton. It aims to help kids with complex special needs, including developmental and intellectual disabilities, mental health concerns and physical and chronic conditions, to connect to specialized care.
“We will never give up on children and youth in our province,” he said. “They're the future of our province, and we'll make sure they'll continue to receive the supports and services they need.”
